Like it or not, the world’s economies are becoming increasingly globalised.

The continuing emergence of the Eastern world as a major economic power is just one factor driving globalisation, but one which is increasingly hard to ignore. Even within the Western world, however, the combination of globally organised enterprises and increasingly multi-national populations mean that modern contact centres – and systems that support them – must be enabled for a global operation.

Global enablement is far more than providing content in multiple languages. Rather, the vagaries of regions, scripts, locales and time zones must also be catered for.

Consider for example the case of a road accident which occurred at 8:45pm EDT in New York but was handled by an agent working using IST in India. In which time format is the information stored? How does a Canadian head-office report on Agent activity in India? Or, consider the case of an French national emailing an American corporation from Hong Kong. In which language should you respond?

In a world of follow-the-sun 24×7 contact centres, both situations are ripe for confusion and error, unless the common platform is fully globally enabled.

Every element of numero, from the self-service portal to the contact centre user interface, from queries and searches to reports, from natural language recognition to automated responses, from the content repository and knowledgebase to spell-checking and quality-assurance is enabled for multi-locale, multi-language operation.